By Narayan Neupane, Kathmandu, Dec 27: The Election Commission (EC) of Nepal has started updating the names of the voters registered in the voter list for the upcoming election of the House of Representatives (HoR).

The incumbent government has already fixed the dates for the mid-term polls of HoR on April 30 and May 10 next year. According to Commission's Spokesperson Raj Kumar Shrestha, necessary groundwork for the upcoming mid-term election has started and the upgradation of the voters' name was initiated.

The constitutional body that is responsible for conducting and monitoring elections as well as to register the political parties and candidates and reporting election outcomes has to prepare its action plan for the election to hold the general election on a timely manner.

The EC has already prepared draft to devise an action plan to conduct the poll in the rightly and timely manner. Spokesperson Shrestha shared that they were giving the draft a final touch.

Furthermore, the Commission is undertaking budget estimation for the election for a huge number of human resources and other types of resources that are needed to hold the election.

In the last federal and provincial elections, the election authority had spent over Rs 7 billion. It is expected that the recurring cost of the upcoming general elections would be around the same amount.

An additional cost could be incurred in the upcoming election while adhering to the health safety measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, opined Shrestha. Once the budget estimation is done, the proposal would be sent to the Ministry of Finance for the approval of the budget.

The EC is also taking stock of the availability of the machinery items such as computer, photocopy machine, vehicles and materials such as ballot papers and ink among others in the district election offices across the country.

Along with the upgradation of the voters' name in the voter list, the EC was also going to upgrade the code of conducts for the election.

There are over 130 political parties registered in the EC while the number of eligible voters stands at over 15.4 million in the country.